


Hard Reset

by icewhisper



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Maes Hughes Lives, Parental Maes Hughes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22320745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: As if it wasn’t enough that he’d had to fake his death and go into hiding, of course Ed would show up on Maes’ doorstep with a child-sized version of his best friend.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Maes Hughes, Edward Elric & Roy Mustang, Gracia Hughes/Maes Hughes, Maes Hughes & Roy Mustang
Comments: 16
Kudos: 182





	Hard Reset

**Author's Note:**

> AKA the deaging fic no one asked for.

He was really getting tired of Xing’s storm season.

He shifted, uncomfortable, on the couch, book forgotten for a moment, and reached up to rub at his chest. The ache was there again, same as it always seemed to be when the weather turned cold and rainy these days. It was a small price to pay, he knew, when the alternative was dying alone in a phonebooth, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever be used to it.

Gracia cast him a worried look over Elicia’s head and he gave her a reassuring smile that was probably still halfway to a grimace. “It’s just the rain,” he told her, but she still got up and circled around to his back so she could rub his shoulder. He tilted his head back and she bent to give him a kiss. “You’re too good for me.”

She opened her mouth, probably ready to tell him he should rest, but someone knocked, heavy, at the door. They all stiffened and Elicia looked up from her toys, wide-eyed and scared. He motioned for Gracia to take her into another room as he reached for his gun. It was probably just Mrs. Chan, he told himself as he took the safety off and walked slowly to the door. The leak in her roof had probably started up again. It wasn’t those monsters coming for him – he _knew_ it wasn’t those monsters coming for him. They were dead, killed off during the Promised Day. His family was safe.

He still didn’t let go of the gun as he opened the door a crack and saw-

“Ed?” He opened the door the rest of the way, surprise losing out to worry when he saw the blind horror on the boy’s face. His hair was loose, mostly fallen out of his braid and his clothes bloodstained. He was soaked. “Ed, what-”

The boy shoved a bundle at him before he could finish and it was only the familiar sound of a disturbed child that kept him from dropping it. He stared down at the baby with its scrunched up face and noticed absently that it was wrapped in what looked like a blue military jacket.

“It’s Mustang,” Ed choked out, voice fragile. “The baby. It’s _Mustang_.”

Heart in his stomach, he urged Ed inside and to the couch right as the baby – as _Roy_? – started to cry. Ed flinched at the noise, but Maes untangled the baby from the wet coat and brought him back to his chest, bouncing. “Shh,” he murmured as he rocked, “it’s okay…”

Gracia inched out, checking, and he told her to grab towels without fully processing that he’d even spoken to her. He thought he might have told her to leave Elicia in her room, but it was just as possible that she did it on her own, because he’d married a smart woman.

“Maes, what’s going on?” she asked when she passed him a towel and ran a smaller one over the baby’s head to try and dry the tufts of black hair. He gaped at her in response, not sure he could say the words yet – not sure he _believed them_ yet – but she stepped away to pick up the jacket he’d abandoned on the floor.

A watch fell out and he forgot how to breathe.

Roy’s State Alchemist watch. The one he’d had in Ishval with the bullet hole left by Heathcliff’s shot. Roy had gotten another one after the war that he carried most days, but on the days the memories haunted him more loudly than normal, he reached for the damaged one.

The last time he spoke to Riza, she’d mentioned he’d been carrying it since he got his sight back.

“What happened?” he asked Ed, horrified voice barely above a whisper.

Ed was silent for a long minute, but when the baby – oh, God, it was really Roy, he was going to throw up – quieted, he swallowed. “Rogue alchemist,” he said, staring down at his hands. Flesh hands. God, he would have celebrated it with Ed under any other circumstance. It was something they _should_ be celebrating, but it was being overshadowed by the tiny body in his arms. “I’m not military anymore. Al’s still recovering, but I’d wanted to visit Ling. Mustang was on his way to visit his aunt, I guess?” He shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know. We saw each other at the train station in Tung Shao and we were heading towards Qiángdà. It got ambushed. I don’t have my alchemy anymore and it’s been raining for weeks.”

“Roy’s gloves,” Gracia murmured. She knew where this was going.

“He’s been through the Gate. He doesn’t need them anymore,” Ed explained, “Doesn’t change that fire’s useless in the rain, damn bastard.”

“Ed,” he admonished softly. His legs trembled and Gracia moved to take Roy from his arms, but he held on tighter and sank into the chair behind him.

“He took whatever passengers he could find,” Ed continued. “Most got killed in the crash, but the ones that survived…” He sucked in a breath. “He was trying to make chimeras. I don’t know. He went for us first. I think he wanted to get us out of the way so he didn’t have to worry about anyone fighting back and Mustang had a goddamn concussion.” He stopped when he saw Maes and Gracia both give Roy a wide-eyed look of horror and shook his head. “He’s fine. I checked.”

Gracia nodded without Maes having to say anything and hurried off towards the phone to call Dr. Huang.

“We just need to be sure,” he said and hoped Ed didn’t think it meant they didn’t trust him. For all the experience with concussions Maes was sure Ed had, they had to check. They had to make sure Roy was okay. “Keep going.”

“He miscalculated. The circles for human transmutation and making chimeras are similar enough at the base, but his values were off; chemical compounds were out of order and leveled out wrong. He… Mustang knew. I don’t know how he knew…”

Maes did. He remembered the dark days after Ishval when Roy only slept every few days and poured his own blood into buckets like bleeding himself dry would bring back the people he’d burned in the desert. Roy was _very_ familiar with human transmutations and the different circles in that family, even if he’d never taken the final step the way the Elric brothers had.

He didn’t tell Ed that, just urged him along as Roy fell asleep in his arms.

“He put him in there with something. I don’t even know. I kept trying to get loose, but my arm was dislocated and I couldn’t get out in time. He activated the circle and… I don’t know. Something went wrong. It wasn’t balanced right and everything just…” He raised his hands in a pantomime of an explosion. They were shaking. “Killed him and the other hostages. Probably destroyed whatever animal he’d been trying to use, but Mustang was like that when I got loose.”

“You need to get checked out too,” Maes told him gently. Bruises. Cuts. Whichever shoulder had been dislocated, he had a feeling Ed had needed to pop it back in himself. There was a gash cutting through the bicep of an arm that looked too skinny that probably needed stitches. They should probably find a mechanic to look at his leg too, just to be sure.

“I had to bring him somewhere,” Ed kept going as if he hadn’t heard him. “I knew you were still recovering, but Mustang told me to go here if I got out and he didn’t. I didn’t know where else to bring him…”

Maes looked down at Roy and forced himself to breathe. “You did the right thing.”

“Then, why do I feel like I was too slow?” he asked, staring at Maes like he was begging for an answer the man didn’t have.

Dr. Huang gave the baby – _Roy_ , it was _Roy_ – a clean bill of health and put eighteen stitches into Ed’s arm before she left. Gracia left with Elicia to buy formula after she’d shuffled Ed off to their room to get some sleep, commenting lightly on their lack of a guest room.

Maes stayed where he’d collapsed in the chair and hugged Roy to his chest as he slept. The ache was still there, a dull throb where the bullet had cut into him and where Lust’s claws had pierced through his shoulder, but he paid it no heed as he tried to wrap his head around it all. Ed had promised he and Al would research, that they’d use the Philosopher's Stone they refused to use on themselves if it meant getting Roy back to normal. He believed them, knew they’d do anything they could to try and fix what had been broken.

Ed had looked crestfallen when he told him that the one Marcoh used to fix Roy’s eyes had broken after, that it hadn’t even had the power left to heal Havoc _and_ Roy. It had fixed Havoc’s spine and Roy’s hands, but Roy’s vision hadn’t been quite the same. His friend had only just been admitting that he might need glasses the last time they’d spoken.

“I’ll see you soon,” Roy had told him before they hung up, a goodbye and a promise all in one, because while Roy had managed to smuggle him to Xing with his aunt’s connections, he hadn’t seen his friend since before things had fallen apart. Roy hadn’t been able to make it out to him without raising suspicion and he’d been more or less comatose after Knox pulled him out of the phonebooth, anyway.

Gracia had seen Roy during the mockery of a funeral before he hugged them both goodbye and Gracia used the ready-made excuse that she just couldn’t be in the city anymore, not now that Maes was gone. She’d said he’d looked like he hadn’t slept in days, that she’d been able to smell the whiskey on him and that his speech had kept slipping back into Xingese the way it did whenever he was inches from breaking. It hadn’t been a comforting thought.

“I’ll see you soon,” Roy had told him, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Alone in the living room, he held his little best friend to his chest and _cried_.

“I called Riza,” Gracia told him hours after she’d come back with supplies and Elicia had stared, awed, at the baby in his arms and asked if that was really Uncle Roy. “She’s sending the others out to where Ed said it happened, but she’s on her way here.”

“His aunt-”

“We’ll call her in the morning.” She squeezed his hand. “You should get some sleep. I set up somewhere for us to put him down.”

He shook his head. “I’m fine here.”

“Maes-”

“This is the first time I’ve seen him in almost two years,” he told her shakily, “and he’s like this. If we can’t fix it…”

It was part of what he loved about Gracia, that she didn’t try to settle him with empty promises that everything would be all right. She could have told him it was okay, that they’d get Roy back to normal, but she kissed his temple instead and told him to lie down on the couch. She’d never understood the intricacies of alchemy, had never had a reason to. If she’d been married to an alchemist, maybe she would have learned, but Maes had never had a knack for it and Roy had kept any displays of it to harmless parlor tricks, meant for nothing more than to entertain Elicia. Neither of them had ever wanted her to understand the darker ends of it, no matter what she’d gleaned from her knowledge of the war.

He moved to the couch at her urging and lay down with Roy settled atop his chest, a little too heavy to be comfortable against the tender scars, but with no intention of moving him. 

“I’m going to sleep in Elicia’s room,” she whispered as she draped a blanket over them both. “If he gets hungry, everything is in the kitchen.”

He didn’t quite fall asleep, mostly dozing for the odd moment when exhaustion pulled at him too strong, but Roy started crying before the sun was up, tiny whimpers that turned into full wails as he carried him to the kitchen. A few years back, a different home, and it would have been like him and Elicia in the early mornings while he tried to let Gracia get some extra sleep. A baby on his hip as he scooped formula into a bottle. Half-mumbled platitudes and songs that made as little sense to him as they probably did to the crying child.

It wasn’t Elicia, though. She’d been like a little Gracia with her hair and eyes that looked more like her mother’s green than his hazel, but Roy had hair as dark as it had ever been and eyes that had never seemed to change from that newborn dark.

It was still him, he told himself. He knew how good Roy’s team was and how smart Ed and Al were. If there was a way to get Roy back, they’d manage it. They’d overthrown an entire government. Ed and Al had gotten their bodies back. If it was possible, they’d do it.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he told Roy and wondered if he was trying to convince himself of it too.

Roy reached for his glasses and smacked his cheek instead.

“Sorry,” Ed apologized a little after dawn when he finally emerged from the bedroom with his hair loose around his shoulders. He was wearing a set of Maes’ pajamas, drawstring pulled tight at his waist, bottoms cuffed, and the neckline of the t-shirt just big enough that Maes could see the scar where Ed’s automail used to be. “I didn’t mean to steal your bed.”

“You needed it,” he said. “I didn’t sleep much, anyway.”

Ed nodded and lowered himself down to sit on the floor beside Maes. He was silent for a long time, watching as Roy crawled around and tried to pull himself up with the coffee table. He wasn’t quite managing it. “How old do you think he is right now?”

“About a year, maybe,” he hazarded. “He’s about the right size for it.”

“I thought kids were walking by then,” Ed countered, but he didn’t look sure. He’d had Al, Maes knew, but they were only a year apart. Ed wouldn’t remember when his brother had started walking.

“Some,” Maes corrected, “not all. They all go at their own pace.” Elicia had started walking early, he remembered. When he told Roy, his friend had said it was because she was trying to run away from him. “Roy started walking late.”

Ed snorted, half-hearted. “Lazy bastard.”

Maes hummed softly and watched as Roy lost interest in the table to crawl towards them instead. He went for Ed, crawling up along his side and into his lap to grab at his hair. Ed cursed. “That’s what you get for leaving long hair in reach of a toddler,” he laughed.

“Yeah, yeah. Damn it, bastard, let go.” He pried Roy’s tiny hands open and swept his hair up into a high tail. “So what happens now?”

“Hawkeye’s on her way here. The team’s on their way to the site. Once we have a better idea…” He let the words hang and shrugged a shoulder as he reached out to brush some hair off Roy’s forehead.

“I’ll call Al, too,” Ed offered, “and Marcoh. Maybe Dr. Knox could help. We got Al’s body back from the Gate. There has to be a way-”

“Ed,” he cut in gently, “don’t start going there. Right now, I need to believe we can fix it, but if we can’t… What you and your brother did was impossible.”

“We have to try!”

“And we will, but for right now, we need to wait to see what the others find at the site. Do you remember anything?”

Ed deflated and shook his head. “No. He kept Mustang and I separate from the others. He must have recognized us and thought I could still do alchemy. When everything backfired…” He closed his eyes. “The only reason it didn’t kill me too was because I was outside of the blast radius. Mustang… I don’t know. The transmutation latched onto him, so that may have protected him. There wasn’t any helping the others. When I got loose, I just grabbed him and got out of there.”

Maes nodded, eyes on Roy as his little friend crawled from Ed’s lap to his. Ed’s hand followed like he wanted to pull him back and Maes passed him back over. “I didn’t sleep last night, because I was scared to let go of him,” he admitted. “It’s okay if you need to hold on.”

“I should have been able to do more,” Ed said as he positioned Roy in his lap with his back to Ed’s chest. Roy settled, content, and chewed on his fist. “I sat with him on the train, because I wanted to annoy him and I figured it was my best chance to now that I can’t do it with my reports.”

“He hates your reports,” Maes chuckled.

“He was supposed to,” Ed said without shame. “I didn’t even know he had family in Xing. I mean, I figured he was part, you know, but…” He shrugged and let go of Roy to gesture vaguely at Roy’s appearance and his features that weren’t quite Amestrian.

“His mother was,” he explained. “Roy was raised there until his parents died and his aunt took him in.”

Ed looked up at him sharply. “His parents died?”

“When he was six,” he said. “Roy never talked about it much. I’m not sure how much he really remembers, but it was about the time a sickness went through that region of the country. A lot of people died.” Roy nearly had, he remembered. He’d barely been over the fever and considered safe to bring into Amestris without risk of spreading the disease when Madame Christmas had all but stormed in and taken him back to Amestris with her. Roy had been raised on that story, told through his aunt’s gruffness or the amusement of her girls.

Ed’s eyes lowered to the tiny body in his lap and Roy, as if he knew they were talking about him, twisted backwards to stare up Ed and wave with a saliva-covered fist. “I didn’t know that.”

“He doesn’t really talk about it. His aunt left before the Promised Day to get somewhere safe.” He didn’t mention Roy’s sisters. It wasn’t anything Roy was ashamed of, he knew. If anything, Roy was proud of the place he’d been raised and the way people reacted when he told them, but it wasn’t his place to give Roy’s entire life story. He’d already shared more than he thought he should.

“Does she know? His aunt?”

“Not yet,” he replied. “We’re waiting to tell her until we know what’s going on.”

“Hawkeye?”

“It’s a two-day journey, but it’s about Roy,” he said with a touch of amusement. “I’d expect her here before the end of the day.”

“She’s gonna kill me for letting him end up like this, isn’t she?”

“You’ve managed some crazy things, Ed, but I don’t think even she can blame you for this one.”

Ed smirked, but the way his shoulders slumped and his hands held onto Roy said he blamed himself.

Riza appeared on their doorstep as lightning crashed and Maes told himself very firmly that it wasn’t an omen.

“Where is he?” she demanded more than asked when he let her in. He pointed to where Gracia had Roy in the living room and she swept past him, only to freeze when she caught sight of her commanding officer.

“I know,” he said softly in response to her wide-eyed stare. “But whatever information the others have-”

“I made communication with them when I got to Xing,” she said. The room went quiet. Gracia stopped bouncing Roy on her knee. Riza pulled in a slow breath. “The transmutation circle was destroyed. There was maybe a third of it left.”

Ed swore. “We need more than that. I recognized some of the mistakes in it, but I couldn’t see the whole thing. If we try to recreate it and we’re off by _one_ compound…”

“There’s no telling if recreating the circle would even work,” she reminded him softly. Ed opened his mouth to argue, but she raised a hand. Riza may have never been an alchemist, but she was her father’s daughter. She knew the science of it, even if she didn’t practice. “We need to talk. I need to know everything.”

Ed repeated the story to her, bent forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the floor until they drifted to Roy and stayed there. It was the same information he’d already told Maes, but hearing it a second time didn’t make him feel any better. Riza’s face wasn’t giving him much hope either.

“We can consult with Dr. Marcoh and Knox,” she agreed, “maybe even Scar. He may remember something about reconstruction from his brother’s research.”

Ed perked up at the idea and Maes couldn’t fault him for it, but he still asked, “Are we sure it’s safe to bring him in? I know he helped on the Promised Day, but he still has plenty of reasons to want Roy dead.”

“They’d had a few discussions about the Ishval reconstruction project,” Riza explained. “And we won’t try anything on him until we have a solid plan.”

“Do it,” Gracia spoke up from the couch as Roy wriggled out of her arms and down towards the floor. She met Maes’ eyes across the room and smiled gently. “We’ll stay here longer and keep him hidden until we know what we need to do.” It would put their plans to move back to Central on an indefinite hold. He knew how eager she was to get back to the city. She wanted Elicia to start school somewhere she’d get to _stay_. They all wanted the normalcy of their lives back and to leave the safehouse behind, but with the amount of unrest still causing trouble in Amestris, they couldn’t bring Roy back there without some kind of plan.

“You’re amazing,” he told her and bent to kiss her quickly before he had to swoop Roy up into his arms to keep him from trying to eat one of Elicia’s toys.

They worked on it for weeks. Marcoh came in. Knox. Scar. Al called as much as he could, apologizing every time that he wasn’t healthy enough to make the trek across the desert. Mei came in his place a handful of times, offering up whatever she could from her knowledge of alkahestry.

The living room became a library. The walls, writing space for theoretical transmutation circles and notes they couldn’t let get buried under piles of papers. Roy’s team split, half to keep investigating the site and half to research, ease of access into Xing only allowed because Ed had gone to Emperor Yao and explained the situation. As far as the rest of the military knew, the team had taken the train hijacking personally and they were still sorting through the wreckage and the bodies for any sign of Roy.

Madame Christmas had come in when the news reached her with her face paler than Maes had seen it since he and Roy had received their marching orders for Ishval. They’d all politely diverted their gazes and tried not to listen as she held Roy close and spoke to him. Some of it was sweet. Most of it was her cursing him out and saying he was the reason she had to dye the gray out of her hair.

He’d stayed hopeful through it, taking every little breakthrough like it was a ticket to getting Roy back, but as the little version of his best friend started standing on his own and, then, started to take wobbling steps on his own, he started to doubt.

When the day came that Ed threw a book against the wall and shouted, he knew it was the end.

“We can’t do it,” Ed admitted and looked for all the world like he’d failed Roy himself. “If we’d had more of the circle left, but the asshole messed it up.”

“You said he had most of it,” Breda pointed out, but the argument felt half-hearted at best.

“He had most of the base foundation for the circle. We’ve got that,” Ed corrected, “but he screwed the compounds. Even if you’re trying to make a chimera instead of resurrection, you need to be able to account for the compounds in the animal you’re using. I don’t know what he used and the thing got obliterated in the blast.”

“Scar couldn’t reconstruct anything?” Gracia asked as she set a tray of drinks down on a clear section of a table.

“He won’t,” Marcoh said and reached for a coffee. “The fact that he used it at all back during the Promised Day went against everything he stood for. He gave us his brother’s research, but that was as far as he’d help.”

Bitterly, Maes wondered how much of it was religion and how much of it was Scar refusing for the simple fact that it was _Roy_ , but he swallowed it back. It wouldn’t do any good to say it. It wouldn’t fix anything.

“The fact that he gave us the research at all was more than I’d hoped for,” Riza admitted, eyes drifting down the hallway to where Roy and Elicia were sequestered away in his daughter’s room.

“That Mei girl and Al have been talking to each other, right?” Breda asked. “They’ve been looking into chimeras.”

Ed shook his head. “Mustang’s not a chimera-”

“We can’t rule that out,” Marcoh cut in with a sigh. “Without knowing what else was in that circle with him, we have no way of knowing if anything stuck.”

“As far as we can tell, the chimera-creating portion of the circle failed and that’s what caused the backlash,” Riza reminded him.

Maes sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “We’re going around in circles.”

“And we keep ending up back at the same damn point,” Ed growled. “That we can’t fix this, not without a Philosopher's Stone and we don’t have one.” His hands curled into fists. Maes knew he was still angry. Ed hated the Stones, but using one on Roy – who had already had one used on himself – was somehow different than Ed using one on himself and Al. He’d gone to Emperor Yao early on in their search, but without knowing the finer details and how much power it would require, Ling had refused. His duty to his country and holding his place as emperor came before letting them use the last Stone they knew about.

Ed had been on the warpath for days after that and Maes hadn’t been much better. He’d lost his temper and sent three of his knives into the wall before the noise of it startled Roy enough to make him start crying in the other room.

“The emperor still hasn’t changed his mind?” Gracia asked sadly.

“No,” Ed growled. “I showed him what we were working with, but the circles are too experimental. They’d draw too much power and after everything that happened, he doesn’t know how much power is even _left_ in his Stone.”

“After everything he went through to get the Stone, I’m not surprised,” Riza said, face stoic, but Maes knew her well enough to hear the disappointment in her voice. She’d been working herself to the bone to try and find some kind of solution, but even she was losing hope. He’d only seen her with Roy a few times in the passing weeks and seen her touch him even fewer. He needed to talk to her about it, to see how she was handling everything, because her and Roy’s dependence on each other had always been worrying. He didn’t want her trying anything drastic.

“We can’t just give up,” Breda argued as crying sounded from the other room and Maes stood. He motioned for Gracia to stay where she’d sat and took the reprieve from the failure scattered around their living room.

“Uncle Roy fell down,” Elicia announced when he walked into the room, teddy bear clutched in her hand as she held it in front of a red-faced and crying Roy to try and calm him down.

“I can see that,” he said kindly as he picked up his friend from where he was lying stomach-down on the floor. “Was he running around?”

“Uh-huh. He tripped.” She tilted her head. “Is he okay?”

“Just scared himself,” he told her once he’d taken a closer look at Roy and made sure there wasn’t any blood. “You used to do the same when you were his age.”

She nodded, but lost interest as she turned back to her toys and he carried Roy back out with him. He was still crying, face pressed into Maes’ neck, but the loud wails had started to soften to sniffles. 

“He’s fine,” he assured everyone, “just fell.”

“He skipped walking and went straight to running,” Gracia said fondly.

“This is still weird,” Breda muttered and reached for a cigarette he’d taken to smoking, only to put it back when he saw the look Maes shot him.

“We hadn’t noticed,” Maes said dryly as Marcoh stepped away, satisfied that Roy wasn’t hurt. The cries had tapered off, but he seemed content to stay where he was in Maes’ arms and Maes wasn’t about to put him down. He settled back into his chair, sure Roy was going to end up falling asleep on him, and looked at Ed. “You’re the one with the most experience here. What’s your judgement?”

Ed didn’t answer for a few minutes, eyes locked on their notes and the circles they’d drawn on the wall as he tried to calm himself down to think rationally. When he finally spoke, it was with mournful eyes stuck on Roy. “We can’t. Everything we have is too theoretical and if that bastard had notes for what he did, they went up in the blast. Whatever happened to Mustang, it was because something went _wrong_ and the chances of us being able to recreate that in the reverse? We have a better shot of killing him than fixing him. If we had a Stone, we could _probably_ make something work, but there’s no way of knowing what kind of power it would take and if the Stone even has enough power left in it to be useful.

“Al’s still looking into alkahestry, but even that’s a stretch. Mei’s _got_ the knowledge and the training and she hasn’t found anything either.” He shook his head. “Right now, we’re out of options.”

Everyone’s eyes turned towards Roy, but Maes’ searched for Riza and not even her usual masks could hide the fact that her eyes were shining.

She stood before he could say anything and walked out.

“Go talk to her,” Gracia told him as she took Roy from his arms. He barely stirred and, between the two of them, Maes knew she’d at least put Roy back in the crib. He never seemed to.

He nodded and followed after her, trying hard to not think about how Ed had put his head into his hands or the way Breda drove his fist into a pillow instead of the wall. He couldn’t think about it yet.

Riza hadn’t made it far out of the house, legs bent up towards her chest on the front steps, and he sat beside her quietly. “You’re not failing him,” he told her as she flinched, “and whatever you’re thinking of doing, he wouldn’t want you to.”

She looked at him, surprised, and he gave her a knowing look. Whether she was thinking about playing with taboos or simply killing herself, he wasn’t sure, but he knew her and Roy’s codependency well enough to know it was one of the two. Roy loved hard and was loved back equally hard in return, but his and Riza’s relationship had always been some odd gray area that he’d never been able to put a name too. Some days, he’d thought they were in love with each other, but on others, he was convinced they loved each other with the same kind of familiarity he and Roy had. He wasn’t sure if either of them had ever rightly known which it was, but it didn’t matter anymore, because that Roy wasn’t _here_ anymore.

Now, what they had was a toddler who was slowly starting to lean closer to two than one.

“It wasn’t a mission. It was dumb luck, Riza,” he told her. He didn’t call her by her first name often, but Hawkeye felt too impersonal and he reached over to take her hand. “Another day, another train, and it wouldn’t have been them. Maybe it would have been Ed or one of the other hostages. Maybe no one else would have survived it. It was bad luck, but it was dumb luck that it was them on that train.”

“You’re not angry?”

“I’m livid,” he corrected. “I’ve been taking care of my best friend for almost three months now. I’ve been getting up with him, because he’s got another tooth coming in and he can’t sleep through the night. I’ve been getting him bottles and jars of baby food instead of the whiskey and the steak we’d been planning to get when this was all over. If I could kill the bastard that did this to him, I would.” He let out a breath and reached to rub at his bad shoulder with his free hand. “But I can be grateful that Ed was there to bring him here and hate myself for being grateful for it, because I know how much this has torn him up.”

“He’d want to be here and working on all his plans,” she said softly as her lip trembled.

“And maybe, one day, he’ll get to,” he said. “Maybe, one day, they’ll find something, but no one is going to find anything if we kill ourselves looking at the same notes over and over. For right now… For right now, I think Ed’s right and we need to stop.” Saying it out loud hurt. It felt like he was giving up on his best friend, but there were no other options.

“He’d tell me I’d have to become Fuhrer,” she mused with a watery laugh. “We all know I don’t have the political pull for that.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed, “but that doesn’t mean you quit. If anything, he’d want you to prove yourself wrong.”

She bent forward, face hidden in her knees, and he never heard her sob, but he saw the way her shoulders shook. He sat with her until she found the strength to stand up and wipe her tears.

When they went back into the house, the click of the door shutting felt like the close of a chapter.

The others cleared out over the next couple of days. Their notes were packed up into boxes, ready to be transported somewhere else, because even if they were admitting defeat now, it didn’t mean a breakthrough might not come somewhere down the line.

Riza held Roy exactly once after everybody else had gone to the car and Maes left her alone with him. She’d needed the moment to be private – _deserved_ for it to be private – and when she handed Roy back to him after, her smile was gentle instead of heartbroken when Roy reached for her.

Then, they were alone – truly alone for the first time in weeks – and Maes looked down at his best friend with a wry smile. “So what now?” he asked Roy as his friend babbled back at him. “This wasn't how I planned on standing with you as you become Fuhrer." If he did at all, he realized with a dull sort of horror that he hadn’t fully considered before. If they were giving up, it meant Roy would be growing up all over again. Different childhood. Different motivations. Roy might never even _want_ to reach that high this time around. He might never…

It was the first time he looked down at Roy and saw a child instead of his best friend.

The first time he realized his Roy – more than likely – was well and truly gone.

“Maes?”

He pulled his eyes up from the fucking _child_ in his arms and stared at his wife, lost. “I don’t know what to do.”

She looked at him like he’d said something funny. “Look at how you’ve been taking care of him this whole time,” she said. “Does it remind you of anything?”

Elicia, he thought automatically. She’d been so small when she was born and he’d refused to let her go. He’d barely been able to tear himself away from her long enough to go to work and had only survived the long hours with a desk full of pictures. “It’s not the same,” he started, but she only raised an eyebrow at him.

“Isn’t it?”

“His aunt-”

“-would take him in a second if she could, but we both know she’s getting older,” she reminded him, “and we both know she wouldn’t want to raise him in that environment again.”

“He turned out okay,” he argued weakly, but he knew what she meant. Roy’s relationship with his aunt had always been one of blunt honesty and his friend had known she’d never wanted kids, would have never stepped into a parental role at all if his parents hadn’t died. His aunt had run herself ragged trying to hide the darker parts of that world from him when he was little. He’d still found out eventually, Maes knew, with stories that made Roy’s eyes go even darker than normal and always sent him running for a bottle.

No, he realized, Madame Christmas wasn’t in a place to do this all over again, but what else could they do? He stared at Gracia, begging for an answer, and she reached out to smooth down Roy’s hair.

“This isn’t you asking me for permission to spend a night out with Roy,” she teased, but her eyes still looked serious. “We both knew from the very beginning what you wanted to do if we couldn’t fix this.”

He’d married a woman who could see through every layer of him and stare right through to his bones. Every part of himself, every thought. She knew everything. And she knew he didn’t want to let go of Roy. “Elicia-”

“-has been asking for weeks if she should still be calling him Uncle Roy or little brother. I think she’ll adjust just fine.”

The best wife. The best daughter. He kept Roy balanced on his hip and reached out to draw Gracia into his other side so he could kiss her. “I love you,” he said against her lips. “I love you so much.”

She patted his cheek. “Should I get Elicia and the camera?”

He grinned.

Emperor Yao – after a lot of screaming from Ed – got them the papers they needed. As far as anyone would know, Gracia had been pregnant when they went into hiding and had given birth to Roy Hughes while they were in Xing. They’d named him after his best friend who had made sure their family would be safe, even if little Roy would never get to meet his namesake.

As far as anyone outside of their research team knew, Roy had been killed in the hijacking. Ed, concussed and in shock, had lost track of Roy in the chaos and they’d found what was left near the end of the search. He still wouldn’t talk about it.

Maes, Gracia, and their children returned to Central in time for the funeral that felt all too real. The casket that went into the ground was empty, but as Elicia hung off her mother’s hand and stared, confused, at the spectacle in front of her, Maes held Roy to him and still felt like he was saying goodbye to his best friend.

_Roy Mustang  
1885 _ _–_ _1916_

“They promoted him to Lieutenant General,” Al said later when the services were over and they’d all returned to the apartment for a drink.

“Bastard’s eating his own foot and he gets a double promotion,” Ed scoffed, but he was grinning behind his glass.

“It’s typical,” Riza said, “especially with everything that happened before.”

“You guys having any issues?” Havoc asked, shifting slightly in his wheelchair as Breda brought him a fresh whiskey. “He and Elicia don’t look all that much alike.”

Maes smiled gently at his kids – still a thought that was taking some getting used to – and shrugged. “I’ve got enough Xingese in me that I can say he takes after my side of the family,” he said, one hand gesturing vaguely at his hair and the way his eyes slanted. “Elicia looks like Gracia, so one of our kids had to eventually take after me.”

Roy got to his feet, running after a laughing Elicia for a minute before he changed his mind and rerouted towards Gracia. “Up!” he demanded, arms held high.

“Demanding kid,” Breda said.

“As if anyone’s surprised?” Maes countered with a laugh as Gracia carried Roy with her towards the kitchen.

“But you’re doing okay?” Fuery asked more seriously.

“I think we’re still adjusting,” he admitted. “We have a lot to figure out.”

“Are you taking the medical discharge?” Falman asked.

Maes shook his head. “I considered it, but there was a lot Roy had planned for this place and I want to help see it through.” He shared a look with Riza that brought on the first smile he’d seen from her all day.

“Mei and I are still researching,” Al said. “I’m nearly well enough to get back on the road. When I am, brother and I are going to split up.”

“We’re gonna go in different directions,” Ed picked up without pausing. “There’s a lot of stuff out there we still don’t know, so if we split up, we can cover more ground. Find out more about alchemy and, maybe, figure out a way to get him back. You know, assuming the military can handle another miraculous return from the dead.”

Maes laughed and tipped his glass towards the brothers as Elicia curled up against his side and Roy came running out of the kitchen with Gracia behind him. He clambered up into Maes’ lap and he wrapped an arm around Roy to keep him from falling. “Maybe,” he hedged, because he was trying to not hold out too much hope these days. If he was going to raise Roy, he needed to do it without the ghost of who Roy had been hanging over him. Roy deserved that much.

“You haven’t seen anything, have you?” Al asked.

Maes shook his head. “No alchemy. No signs of the Gate.” They’d spent the first weeks after Ed had brought Roy to them, terrified, every time he clapped. They weren’t sure if he still had the connection to the Gate as he was now or if it was lost when he changed, but it was something they’d have to watch out for, especially if he showed an interest in alchemy this time around, too. “We’ll keep a closer eye on him when he’s old enough to figure out snapping, though.”

“And his memories?” Riza questioned, brows tipped down in worry.

“Nothing,” Gracia assured her, perched on the arm of the couch beside him. “Even if he does remember, he’s still too young to process it.”

Riza nodded and no one elaborated, but they all knew what she was scared of. Anyone outside this room would have said it was for the best, that this return to childhood was a second chance for Roy to live without the memories that had haunted him after Ishval. It wasn't. Roy had always been meant for more and losing it wasn't a blessing so much as it was the hand they'd been dealt.

A part of him still hoped they’d find a way to right things one day, but if they didn’t, Maes hoped Roy never remembered. Roy had barely been able to handle the memories before. He couldn’t imagine a child being burdened with them.

He glanced around the room to see the somber air the had fallen over everyone and grinned as he hefted Roy up a little higher in his lap. “Hey, Roy,” he urged as Gracia hid a laugh behind her hand. “What’s Ed?”

“Lil!”

“WHAT?!”

“That’s my boy,” he laughed proudly as Elicia shrieked in delight.

“I cannot believe you trained him to say that,” Gracia scolded him, even if the slap she gave his shoulder was half-hearted at best.

“Brother, sit down!”

“I DON’T CARE THAT HE’S A TODDLER. HE’S DEAD!”

The End


End file.
